The Tiger Claw (41 page)

It’s a charade. Please, Allah, don’t let them shoot anyone. Allah, let it be so and I promise to give a month’s salary to immigrants at La Mosquée
.

But a second shot fractured the stillness.

A hare scampered into the underbrush. A kite gave a high-pitched squeal and circled above.

The crowd of students was separating into stoics and lamenters. The SS men had the guns, but the few rebels in the crowd were becoming desperate. If every student was at risk, they had nothing to lose by trying to break away. But trying to escape would only justify the Gestapo in more deaths.

Please, Allah, no more!

Kieffer and his interpreter conferred. The wide circle of the megaphone eclipsed the interpreter’s face again. “It is possible you have trouble believing your senses. Perhaps you are superstitious enough to believe the two men whose deaths you heard can be resurrected by a little journey to Lourdes. We did not wish to execute people before the ladies …” He bowed slightly in the direction of Madame Hoogstraten. “But perhaps you will only tell us where are the arms if you see a man die here, before your eyes.”

Noor felt the words as if they ripped her in two.

Monsieur Hoogstraten must have felt the same. He was mopping his face with his handkerchief. He appeared to be pleading.

The interpreter pointed. Two
milice
gendarmes tore a third student from the crowd.

Noor scanned the student from head to toe in the bounded vision of her binoculars. This one was tall, his blouse coat tailor-made. Leather shoes, available only on the black market. A haughty carriage—no peasant here. He shook off the restraining hands of the
milice
gendarmes as if they soiled him, stepped forward himself.

Kieffer and his interpreter looked a little nonplussed. But the milice gendarmes were ready with cuffs, and soon the young man’s hands were manacled behind him. Kieffer gave an order and a gendarme stepped forward with a blindfold.

Students in the crowd backed away. Someone fainted from the heat and tension.

Oh, Allah, send your farishtas! Send all your angels now!

Now the bourgeois young man was refusing the blindfold. The
milice
gendarmes shoved him to his knees on the sandy surface of the courtyard.

A Luger appeared in the SS captain’s hand.

Monsieur Hoogstraten’s hand reached out and grasped Kieffer’s swastika-banded arm. The SS Captain shook him off. Monsieur Hoogstraten was now gesticulating, thrusting himself between Kieffer and the kneeling man. German and French were being shouted everywhere at once, and the anger of the French students was rendered powerless by the sight of the guns.

A gloved hand pointed the semi-automatic at the young man’s temple.

Noor couldn’t hear what Monsieur Hoogstraten was saying, but she could see his resistance crumbling, see it in the droop of his shoulders and the slight fall of his chin. Suddenly he raised his hands, then held them out.

A gendarme stepped forward and clinched the cuffs on him.

The megaphoned voice announced, “This student is pardoned. Your director has confessed to participation in sabotage and terrorist plots. He is a criminal. He is under arrest. He will show us the weapons. Until all the weapons are found, this institute is under Gestapo supervision. No one is allowed to leave the grounds.”

Monsieur Hoogstraten was a respected, upstanding citizen, not a criminal. He was a fighter in the legitimate, necessary jihad against the Occupation.

The young man was standing up, rubbing his wrists now, as Monsieur Hoogstraten was marched to the Citroën. There was no sign of the two students dragged out of sight.

Before getting in the car, the director turned and met his wife’s eyes.

More discussion and orders in German and French, and the Citroën’s chauffeur left the car. He escorted the maid uphill at gunpoint to the director’s château.

The SS men still ringed the students, administering a rifle butt where needed to assert control. What were they waiting for? Was the maid leading the SS man to the arms? No—if the arms weren’t in the stables any more, Monsieur Hoogstraten had probably told Marius to hide them somewhere off the premises. And for maximum humiliation, the SS captain would make Monsieur Hoogstraten lead them to the cache himself.

Did Monsieur Hoogstraten tell them the whereabouts of Gilbert or Professor Balachowsky?

Non. Pas possible
.

A black-and-red widow spider was slinging sticky threads on a branch above Noor. She shifted carefully, quietly; its bite could be poisonous. A hornet buzzed past. Mosquitoes hovered over the burdock. Minutes dragged by with no change in the tableau in the courtyard. Noor checked the woods behind her again. Movement, uniforms?

Clouds had swirled into arabesques, readying for rain.

The maid and the
milice
chauffeur came back into sight,
walking downhill from the director’s château. The chauffeur’s sandy brown hair and moustache centred in the circle of Noor’s binoculars. He carried a leather suitcase in his left hand, held the maid’s forearm in his right. He thrust her back into the crowd of surrounded students and took the suitcase to the Citroën.

With the suitcase stowed, the black car started, turned around and headed up the driveway.

Madame Hoogstraten’s tearful supplications had broken through the cordon of SS men. She intercepted SS captain Kieffer and his interpreter as they walked towards the Mercedes. The gendarmes, the soldiers and everyone in the crowd was watching her too.

Noor could steal away now. She had the information she had come for, and would send it to London right away: Monsieur Hoogstraten had been arrested. He had agreed to reveal the location of the arms. Gilbert and Professor Balachowsky were still at large. Archambault’s transmitter and her own were likely to be discovered soon if they hadn’t been already; she would tell London both were likely in enemy hands. In any case, they were useless without the security check known only to Archambault and herself.

Madame Hoogstraten’s pleading was now directed at anyone within hearing.

Noor slipped her binoculars back in her pocket, adjusted the pistol in the waistband of her slacks and crept from the bushes. Behind her, words of the megaphone became indistinguishable, then faded. Every rustle and crunch reverberated among the lofty trees. She drew close enough behind the institute’s administration buildings to look through the windows: the Germans had emptied offices and classrooms of people. Crouching, she moved swiftly through the shadow-patterned woods on a course parallel to the institute driveway, heading back to the road.

She could cross the unpaved road past the courtyard wall surrounding the tool shed she and Archambault had used for
transmissions. The squat shape of the greenhouse lay beyond it. Was Marius still free?

Two SS men stood on guard at the corner, backs to Noor, rifles slung over their shoulders, watching the drama in the courtyard at the bottom of the hill. She could steal across the road and the nettle ditch and continue into the woods—they would never notice.

But just in case …

She drew the pistol from her waistband and moved quietly, keeping her eyes on the SS men.

Halfway across now.

Suddenly, a black shape darted between the Gestapo men. The Hoogstratens’ cat was streaking right towards Noor. An SS man was turning, and she was galvanized into a dash for the cover of the woods. A yell, then another, and both were running down the road towards her. Noor jumped a ditch just as sound-burst stole the peace of the woods.

They’ll split up, to cut you off before you reach the institute wall
.

Cover? Cover? Low land. Rock? Tree?

She dropped behind an uprooted tree and turned in one movement, thumb flicking the safety catch off, the heavy steel finger of the gun steady in both gloved hands.

Wait, wait till he’s closer
.

The death’s head wouldn’t stop coming.

Point—shoot
.

Noor squeezed.

The recoil knocked her clasped hands upwards and to the left. The SS man suddenly went down in the ditch among the nettles, a look of disbelief on his face. His rifle flew from his hands, through the air, landing a short distance away.

A second shot, this time from the direction of the greenhouse. Not too far away.

Take his rifle. Now!

She jammed her pistol into her waistband and, without knowing she was going to, bounded in a single fluid movement to the rifle, scooped it up and away.

Then she was off and running again, the rifle grasped tight across her ribs, lungs pumping, heart slamming. Heels jarring against ground, wind whipping her hair against her cheeks, and a huge darkness opening its mouth behind her.

Run faster, run before darkness
.

Crashing thud of jackboots to her right. Coming closer, closer.

Muscles flexed, blood rushed. Danger heightened awareness: she wouldn’t reach the road alive. Was that the rat-a-tat-tat of her imagination or a gun firing?

Not in the back. Not to be shot in the back like prey run to ground. She must turn, turn and face her enemy, look him in the eye.

So she turned, dropped to the ground, to face the second death’s head. On her stomach and barely breathing, the rifle stock wedging into her shoulder. The bolt drew back with a loud click, the bullet sprang from its magazine, slid into the chamber. It waited—she waited—till he came crashing through the woods. And when he was in range, the rifle came up by reflex. Steady. The bullet cracked and flew.

The death’s head grabbed his chest, went down.

A man with no compassion forfeits his right to mine
.

The shots would soon bring other SS. A massive hunt would begin. And if either of the two she had fired on remained to describe her …

Run! Run!

She threw the rifle into the undergrowth and was scrambling over rocks and roots, then running crouched between trees, taking cover behind bushes and too-slender trunks. Leaves and branches flicked and scratched her face, tore at her blouse.

Seconds later, Noor reached the edge of the woods. And the road. She took a deep, gulping breath.

Get your bearings
.

The porticos of the institute jutted up to her right.

I am not a trembling kind of woman
.

But she was trembling like a sheet of foolscap.

She knew very well what happened to anyone in France who shot a German. Even if you missed. The same that happened to Indians who shot Englishmen: arrest and execution. More immediate here, that’s all. But contrary to Herr Kieffer’s speculations on the suicidal desires of people he wanted pliant or dead, she would stay alive. For Armand.

She hadn’t shot a man; she’d shot a Nazi who stood by and watched innocent students executed.

Had she killed one or both of the SS men? If she had killed one, could the wounded one describe her? If so, Kieffer would have soldiers stopping every train, bus, automobile or bicycle between here and Paris, searching for a woman in a white blouse and black slacks.

She hoped she had killed them both.

But then she’d have two deaths to atone for on the Day of Judgement, not just one.

Merde!

Keeping the road in sight but staying within cover of the woods, Noor retraced her steps to where she’d hidden the bicycle. She retrieved her handbag, hid the pistol in its secret compartment and covered the bicycle again. She would tell Odile where to find it.

Noor peeked around the side of a tree, looking up and down the country road. Empty. But now what? Run from the cover of the forest in her buckled two-inch heels, all the way back to Grignon? She hadn’t seen any dogs with the Gestapo, but if they were searching, dogs would be let loose very soon.

Stucco clouds advanced in a solid line on Grignon. The starchy brilliance of the day wilted before their marshalled prowess.

Think!

Thinking didn’t help.

But then, in the distance, came a blustering, popping engine sound—thankfully, not the purr of a Mercedes. As if ordered up by Allah, a fat, rusted
autobus
approached.

It could have Gestapo men on board, it might be stopped by the Gestapo along the way. She’d worry later; this was the best and fastest way away.

Noor stepped from the cover of the woods and waved. The bus drew closer, came up to her and trundled past. Noor shouted after it, ran behind it.

Now it stopped, waited till she caught up. Noor flung herself on and clung to the rear railing, searching the forest and each passing vineyard for pursuing men in black. She glanced down the centre aisle: too few passengers to hide between and too many to make a quick exit possible.

An unmarked stop beside a field. No Gestapo.

A woman moved past Noor.
“Excusez-moi, monsieur,”
she said.

Monsieur?
Of course, monsieur! The Gestapo and the
milice
wouldn’t be looking for a woman in black slacks with her ponytail netted in a black beret. They’d be looking for a man in a beret wearing a white shirt and black trousers.

The
autobus
coughed on—much too slowly for the pulse racing in Noor’s temple—spewing wood-fuel fumes over passing vineyards. Dogs barked in the distance, but no roadblocks barred the bus. By the time it listed to a halt, depositing its passengers on the outskirts of Grignon village, Noor was controlled and purposeful, if a little queasy from
gazogène
fumes mixed with nervous tension.

She drifted casually from the bus stop to the fair. She mingled with the crowd, marvelling that they could not hear the bounce and judder of her heart.

Scan the area
.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Noor rummaged through the rag man’s wares, counted out francs, sous and centimes, and in the water closet of a café wiped her muddy shoes, sent slacks and blouse down the towel chute, let her hair tumble down and changed into someone else’s brown flowered dress.

The disguise released her from herself; she was calm again.